Author: Emily Olyarchuk

We have a great speaker lineup for FinDEVr London which will take place on June 12 & 13. As part of our FinDEVr Feature series, which highlights some of the speakers you will see on stage at the event, we recently interviewed the strategic accounts manager of one of the presenting companies, Trulioo. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with Trulioo’s promo codeTrulioo20LD17.

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

Kim: I started my career as a Java developer at HSBC where I was responsible for optimizing the user experience for their Payments and Global Entitlements customers. In my next career move, I was challenged with growing a valid customer base for an eCommerce business while setting up a rigorous fraud prevention system that captured and protected every cardholder. Before joining the Trulioo team, I spent a few years managing strategic partnerships at a global payments company and advised on payment fraud, security, efficiency and PCI compliance for nonprofits processing credit card and ACH payments worldwide.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

Kim: GlobalGateway provides the widest coverage of identity verification in the world through a single API integration. Developers can access real-time electronic identity verification, identity document verification, and AML watchlist screening all through one platform. We will be announcing a new business solution on-stage at FinDEVr, so you definitely won’t want to miss our presentation.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

Kim: We power some of the top payment and financial services providers in the world with electronic identity verification to help them reduce compliance risk and streamline their client on-boarding experience. My favorite implementation of Trulioo’s GlobalGateway API is by a developer-focused global payments platform that processes billions of dollars a year for thousands of online businesses, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. By integrating Trulioo’s Normalized API, we have helped them expand into 33 countries in six continents.

We have a great speaker lineup for FinDEVr London which will take place on June 12 & 13. As part of our FinDEVr Feature series, which highlights some of the speakers you will see on stage at the event, we recently interviewed the CTO of one of the presenting companies, NuCypher. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with NuCypher’s promo codeNuCypher20LD17.

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

Egorov: Before starting NuCypher, I worked on infrastructure tools at LinkedIn, where we faced some of the thorniest scaling challenges in the world. But my background is as a scientist and physicist, where I worked in an area closely related to quantum computing and cryptography. I was a bronze medalist in the 2003 International Physics Olympiad and graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

Egorov: Proxy re-encryption is an evolution in PKI that provides an elegant solution for multi-party sharing of data. While PKI is great for two-party communication, it doesn’t scale well. In contrast, PRE allows you to transform data encrypted under one set of keys into being encrypted under a second, different set of keys, without any intermediate decryption step or expensive network traffic.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

Egorov: Our application of PRE to Kafka is particularly interesting. NuCypher enables granular, end-to-end encryption of message streams. This allows customers to scale up their Kafka infrastructure without increasing their attack surface, with the added benefit of making Kafka PCI-compliant.

We have a great speaker lineup for FinDEVr London which will take place on June 12 & 13. As part of our FinDEVr Feature series, which highlights some of the speakers you will see on stage at the event, we recently interviewed the CTO of one of the presenting companies, Harborx. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with Harborx’s promo codeHarborx20LD17.

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

Sung: I studied Information Technology at City University of Hong Kong. In 2009, I started in iOS development, building numerous mobile applications for various industries ranging from entertainment and healthcare to insurance, banking and finance.

I bonded with co-founders of Harborx, Cyrus Wen and Wissam Sabbah, over the vision of creating a better trading experience for a wider audience, based on mobile technology and social trading. Together, we started crafting a unique mobile trading system based on our previous experience in fintech and mobile app development.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

Sung: I believe that Harborx is made unique by the way we leverage functional and reactive programming.

Through adopting Reactive programming, i.e. ReactiveX, our frontend team can manipulate UI events and API responses, streaming data in a single consolidated framework. Our developers transform all signals from different parts of the system into UI elements presented in a mobile device.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

Sung: If I had to pick one, it would be building our own trading engine on top of Akka Cluster. This technology takes the actor programming model to its extreme as a distributed system, providing the resilience and scalability the trading engine needs.

With Akka, we’ve been able to break the whole complex backend system into functional units which can be updated without affecting the rest of the modules, effectively minimizing system downtime.

Our team takes “Infrastructure as Code” (IaC) seriously. We have built the whole stack in the cloud using Kubernetes as the container engine. We avoid manual configuration of environments and enforce consistency by representing the desired state of their environments through code.

We have built an environment where team members can work together with a unified set of practices and tools to deliver applications and their supporting infrastructure rapidly, reliably, and at scale. This is something many development teams struggle with, and we’re happy to have found the solution.

We have a great speaker lineup for FinDEVr London which will take place on June 12 & 13. As part of our FinDEVr Feature series, which highlights some of the speakers you will see on stage at the event, we recently interviewed the CEO of one of the presenting companies, NuCypher. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with NuCypher’s promo codeNuCypher20LD17.

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

Wilkison: I started my career at Morgan Stanley where I advised technology, media, and telecommunications companies on M&A and equity/debt financings. I spent a lot of time covering internet infrastructure during the early innings of cloud infrastructure. I also saw first-hand the security and compliance obstacles faced by large enterprises in adopting these new technologies. At NuCypher, a lot of the problems we’re solving have to do with removing these roadblocks to cloud and big data adoption.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

Wilkison:NuCypher is a proxy re-encryption platform that enables enterprises to securely tap into the power of cloud computing. We’re purpose built for the era of cloud and big data computing.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

Wilkison: NuCypher’s exciting use case is cloud enablement – by giving enterprises a way to securely and compliantly move bursty and transient workloads to the public cloud, we’re able to boost our customer’s agility and competitiveness.

We have a great speaker lineup for FinDEVr London which will take place on June 12 & 13. As part of our FinDEVr Feature series, which highlights some of the speakers you will see on stage at the event, we recently interviewed the CEO of one of the presenting companies, Harborx. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with Harborx’s promo codeHarborx20LD17.

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

Sabbah: I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and an associate degree in Finance from the American University of Beirut. I worked as a developer, and after a year, entered the field of corporate banking. I fell in love with currency trading and had a blast as a dealer. But banking and trading are too traditional of an industry, so while I loved what I did, I didn’t enjoy much the corporate environment and craved for a change.

In the early 2010s, startups were happening everywhere, so this idea of taking currency trading, shaking it up and making it accessible to everyone in the form of a game-like mobile app came around, although, having a fully-mobile trading platform with no desktop version was unheard of at the time. I am passionate about trading, global markets and technology, and I was lucky enough to connect with Harborx co-founder and good friend Cyrus Wen, who shared my vision. Cyrus and his partners helped assemble a team of talented developers who loved our idea. This is how Harborx was born.

Every day, we learn from each other how to combine the best of both worlds – the drive and fun of the ever-moving financial markets with development solutions to build our own trading platform. Basically, we have developed a mobile app that we ourselves would like to play and learn something new every day.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

Sabbah: Traditional forex brokers use a tried and tested third-party desktop-first solution which is reliable but lacks flexibility. It couldn’t work for us since we’re a fully mobile-oriented trading platform. Thus, to support the gaming features, we leverage the actor pattern (Scala/Akka) to build a distributed trading system of our own. Thanks to our decoupled architecture, which was developed in-house, we were able to adapt faster. Our event-driven programming paradigm allows us to decouple the core trading functionality from the gaming features through internal Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) and Publish/Subscribe patterns.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

Sabbah: I love the Leaderboard, one of our latest features. This is an ongoing competition where app users are ranked based on their trading success. The Leaderboard makes Harborx an addictive app and users are ranked in real time as they trade in real time.

In addition to being a competitive mobile app, Harborx is a live trading environment, where you have lightning-speed price feeds and extremely low latency. While the speed is a must-have for most games these days, this requirement increases tenfold when people trade with their real funds. At Harborx, we stream price feed data to our users by leveraging the power of Message Queue Telemetry Transport, aka MQTT, i.e. the same technology behind Facebook Messenger.

The Leaderboard is the project where the live trading environment weaves with a live game, a synthesis of everything we’ve learned over the years. The team worked hard on the Leaderboard, and we are happy with the result.

We have a great speaker lineup for FinDEVr London which will take place on June 12 & 13. As part of our FinDEVr Feature series, which highlights some of the speakers you will see on stage at the event, we recently interviewed the CEO of one of the presenting companies, Streamdata.io. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with Streamdata.io’s promo codeStreamdata.io20LD17.

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

Horesnyi: I started my career as a developer for a B2B ISP in France then coded a (back then) high bandwidth (384kbps!) Internet access layer for a US ISV. After a database experience in Mexico and B2B data architecture for multinationals, I joined the founding team of Radianz to run our midmarket and exchange business in the US, as part of the Flashboy team depicted by Michael Lewis. We sold Radianz to British Telecom, and this first step in the cloud industry allowed me to get a clear view of the path technology and finance were taking together, especially with the rise of the API economy.

When I joined Streamdata.io as CEO back in 2014, there was already a very skilled and gifted team in charge of developing our product. All this knowledge allowed me to easily interact with them and start working on the SaaS solution I had the feeling the market was waiting for.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

Horesnyi: If I was to think about one thing and one thing only, I think I would talk about time-to-market. Nowadays, the pace of innovation is so fast that there’s no longer room for a company to waste time developing everything on its own. With our solution, any API provider can save a year of development (and associated costs) to implement real-time features. And for developers consuming API data, it’s just a matter of minutes for them to transition from polling data to taking advantage of real-time data flow.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

Horesnyi: I really like what Xignite did with its CloudStreaming solution. Through a partnership between our two companies, Xignite’s CloudStreaming solution leverages our unique technology to deliver streaming market data directly to millions of devices and apps. For us, working with such a player in the financial data industry is a great way to demonstrate how robust and efficient our product is.

We have a great speaker lineup for FinDEVr London which will take place on June 12 & 13. As part of our FinDEVr Feature series, which highlights some of the speakers you will see on stage at the event, we recently interviewed the CTO of one of the presenting companies, eWise. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with eWise’s promo codeeWise20LD17.

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of
your company?

See: I started out as junior developer in a startup consulting company in the Philippines. Our main clients back then were other startups that built their business around open source technologies like Maestro for Maven. That’s where I immersed myself with open source technologies and how to navigate through its communities, including with people all around the world from Australia to Asia, Europe and America.

A few years later, I started working for a Japanese company specialized in internet ad marketing – like what Google Adwords does but for the Japanese market. That was my first experience with a massive scale application handling 4TB of data, 1M partner relationships generating 200M page views, 3M clicks and 100k transactions a day. After this experience, I started to work in the banking software space. I joined a fortune 500 company that provides online banking solutions and was managing their channel division. That’s when I heard of eWise and all the great things the FinTech company was doing, which made me decide to join eWise.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

See: When I joined eWise, I had the mission to reengineer entirely eWise Aegis, our patented core technology platform that allows safe and secure financial account aggregation. Aegis is ground breaking in the sense that it flips an old idea on its head. When given the task to attain data from several sources, a typical approach would be to check whether those sources have APIs that can be used for data retrieval. If the APIs do not exist, then comes in the hard decision for technical leaders, whether or not they want to opt for the HTML parsing/screen scraping approach. This is usually a hard decision to make because it’s not a matter of whether they can do it but rather, can they maintain it and what would be the cost of maintaining those. And if they do decide to opt for the approach of screen scraping, there’s the matter of accessing data through a secured means. Meaning, they would also have to get access to their users’ financial accounts credentials and store them securely on their servers, so that when they execute their screen scrapers, they can use those credentials to access the user’s data on behalf of that user. Of course, engineering and security teams would always be familiar in how to secure those data from a technical standpoint to a process one, but it would continuously be an arm’s race preventing a possible breach/leak. The risk of losing those data is just too high.

eWise’s Aegis, though, manages all those risks. The platform allows the user to save and store all of their financial accounts credentials (login and password) in the Personal Data Vault installed on their own device, and no one else than the user can access these credentials. Neither the service provider (the bank using eWise Account Aggregation service) nor eWise are storing the user’s credentials, which considerably reduces the risk of being hacked.

That is, Aegis technology allows us to connect both to direct channels like PSD2 APIs and to indirect channels via HTML parsing. Aegis also manages all the complexity of creating and maintaining these connectors by investing in internal tooling to allow us to maintain those connectors the most effective and automated way. And with Aegis’s patented technology, the risk of having all your eggs (i.e. credentials) in one basket (i.e your server) is gone because Aegis connectors run in the client side – i.e. the end user’s device like his laptop or phone. That means eWise’s clients (financial institutions, fintechs, etc.) would just have to provide their users the Personal Data Vault which they install on their laptops or phones, and the Aggregation will be performed from the user’s device. Instead of sending credentials to the server side where aggregators are running, they will send it to the locally installed Personal Data Vault, which means the end user’s credentials never leave their device.

To summarize, what’s ground breaking about eWise’s technology is that it allows data aggregation both via direct channels (APIs) and indirect channels (HTML parsing for non payment accounts – not included into PSD2 scope), and it allows the end users to be the custodian of their own data, not the aggregation provider.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

See: We have launched many cool implementations lately. One of the latest ones will be the launch of a challenger bank mobile app, and Account Aggregation is at the core of their app. “First, with the app, you can view your current bank accounts, transfer money instantly, and we’ll save you thousands of pounds a year by analyzing your data and figuring out how we can improve your finances. A central objective is not trying to make customers shift bank accounts – rather, adding loads of value up front,” said their CEO. They are launching a lifestyle focused banking portal, regardless of banking relationships.

We have a great speaker lineup for FinDEVr London which will take place on June 12 & 13. As part of our FinDEVr Feature series, which highlights some of the speakers you will see on stage at the event, we recently interviewed the CEO & Co-Founder of one of the presenting companies, LeanXcale. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with LeanXcale’s promo codeLeanXcale20LD17.

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

Jimenez-Peris: For 25 years, I have devoted my career to resolving the main bottleneck of operational databases — transactional processing — in my position as director of Distributed Systems Laboratory at the Technical University of Madrid (UPM). Additionally, I am the CEO and Co-Founder of LeanXcale and the technical director of the international projects CoherentPaaS, LeanBigData and CloudDBAppliance.

During my scientific career, I have been a co-author of over 100 publications in international conferences and journals, co-author of a book on database replication, as well as the manager of large international research projects, such as Adapt, Stream, and CumuloNimbo. The projects included teams between 20 to 50 people and involved 6 to 11 companies and research organizations, receiving public grants amounting to over 6 million euros. In addition, I am a co-inventor of 2 patents and 1 additional patent application. The research of my laboratory resulted in technology transfers to big international companies such as Ericsson, Telefonica, and Bull.

In March 2015, I quit my scientific career to launch LeanXcale. The idea behind the business was to commercialize an ultra-scalable database and the technology at the core of LeanXcale attracted much attention in Silicon Valley. Ten top tech companies — Twitter, Salesforce, Cloudera, HortonWorks, Pivotal, Heroku, HP, and Microsoft — invited me to speak at their headquarters.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

LeanXcale has developed an Ultra-Scalable SQL Operational & Analytical database using unique scalability to solve the lack of real-time big data support for financial organizations.

Jimenez-Peris: My favorite features of the LeanXcale platform are

The scalability of the operational database to millions of transactions per second and 100s of nodes

The combination of operational and analytical capabilities in a single database system

The elasticity of the database, which enables the provisioning and decommissioning of new nodes as needed in a totally non-intrusive way.

The polyglot integration with other NoSQL data stores enabling queries across SQL and different NoSQL data stores.

The efficiency of the storage engine in multi-core and NUMA architectures, as well as its hardware acceleration by means of vectorial processing and the acceleration, thanks to its hybrid columnar storage.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

Jimenez-Peris: Operational database for fintech, either on premise or in the cloud, with capabilities to perform analytical queries over operational data.

We have a great speaker lineup for FinDEVr London which will take place on June 12 & 13. As part of our FinDEVr Feature series, which highlights some of the speakers you will see on stage at the event, we recently interviewed the developer community manager of one of the presenting companies, eSignLive by VASCO. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with eSignLive’s promo codeeSignLivebyVASCO20LD17.

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

Williams: My career started as a Technical Evangelist at Actuate Corporation (now OpenText Analytics), a data analytics company. My role there was to build an online community of developers and support them through the delivery of a wide range of tools and documentation. It was an extremely successful model and one that I implemented when I joined eSignLive over two years ago. Today, my team of technical evangelists and I support prospects, customers and partners that use the eSignLive API and SDKs through our online developer community. It has become THE place for developers to find information about how to integrate e-signatures into their web and mobile apps. We’ve developed quick start guides, tutorials, an online forum to enable peer-to-peer conversations, and a code share section where developers can post and find code examples to facilitate rapid integration. A huge success that I am personally very proud of.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

Williams: Electronic signature as a whole is game-changing technology because it allows organizations to fully automate businesses processes – processes that would normally fall to paper whenever a signature or approval is required. Taking away the paper problem improves operational efficiencies and helps deliver an exceptional customer experience that can drive high adoption and completion rates. One of the biggest advantages of e-signature technology, and with eSignLive in particular, is the ability to use the same code no matter the deployment type (e.g., public cloud, private cloud or on-premises), device or channel. This can all be done without investing in the test infrastructure for the solution and without costly install periods or developer licenses.

E-signature technology also provides direct visibility into how and when the transaction took place. You can track who signed, in what order, when and where – something that simply isn’t possible in the paper world. Coming from a data analytics background, the more data the customer can gather from a transaction the better. This information is not only beneficial from an audit and compliance perspective but can also help glean insights into the customer journey – enabling organizations to measure the effectiveness of the customer experience and pinpoint areas of drop-off or confusion.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

Williams: The analyst firm, Celent, recently published a case study about BMO (Bank of Montreal) and their digital transformation initiative in personal banking. BMO implemented an enterprise-wide eForms and eSignature shared services platform in order to provide a contextual and responsive digital user experience across its mobile account opening process. Partnering with software companies, GMC Software and eSignLive by VASCO, BMO delivered a straight-through digital on-boarding process – enabling customers to open an account using their smartphone in less than 8 minutes. A fantastic customer success story that is helping the bank save $98 million (U.S.) annually.

We have a great speaker lineup for FinDEVr London which will take place on June 12 & 13. As part of our FinDEVr Feature series, which highlights some of the speakers you will see on stage at the event, we recently interviewed the speaker for one of the presenting companies, aixigo. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with aixigo’s promo codeaixigo20LD17.

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

Gruendler: I am a technical consultant and software architect at aixigo AG in Germany. Having more than 15 years of expertise in developing and managing international software projects for financial services, I’m currently actively developing high performance portfolio management software.

My focus is combining software engineering skills with the ability to bridge technical and business backgrounds. These skills are based upon the experiences from software projects in the european banking sector such as Citigroup, Commerzbank, DAB Bank, Cortal Consors and several more.

My current field of interest focuses on delivering digital wealth management software solutions at retail scale.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

Gruendler: With aixigo’s Digital Portfolio Management solution we offer you high performance services for complex portfolio data. So that you can not only provide high speed responses for human speech interaction but can also perform mass calculations for millions of portfolios within a few minutes. With this technology, we bring new business models (for example Wealth Management) to the retail market that have only represented a conceivable opportunity for high value clients so far.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

Gruendler: The core component of our portfolio management system is a high performance in-memory-engine. Current programming models waste performance speed due to slow memory access. Our new stream oriented computing engine optimizes data access in a way that enables the CPU to perform operations 100-200 times faster than classic algorithms can. This high performance engine allows for the provision of complex functionalities for a large set of clients, as well as allowing for such a provision in low latency scenarios (e. g. analytics, monitoring or rebalancing). It is even possible to use our services with human speech interactions (such as Amazon Alexa) or AI interactions (IBM Watson).